


Archetypes

by Her_Madjesty



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Angst, Broken people, F/M, Gen, Longing, Pining, Quartet at the Ballet, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 16:09:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12369327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: The Romantics forget that swans have teeth, that they hiss and scream and steal away fingers from naughty children whenever their territory’s encroached upon.





	Archetypes

**Author's Note:**

> It's 3am, because of course it is. 
> 
> This - let's call it a collection - is based on the characters portrayed in "Quartet at the Ballet" in Anastasia: The Musical. These primary characters - Odette, Siegfried, and Rothbart - all seem to have in-show counterparts. I note this because I'm wildly obsessed with Swan Lake, and the whole abbreviated show-within-a-show was splendid.
> 
> That said, what follows may be a bit pretentious, a bit artsy, and full of stretching metaphor. I hope you like it. XOXO

I. Odette

The Romantics forget that swans have teeth, that they hiss and scream and steal away fingers from naughty children whenever their territory’s encroached upon. Anya has never seen a swan save for in the paintings sold on Theater Street, but in the white snow of St. Petersburg – sorry, comrade, _Leningrad –_ her thick, browning coat looks crystalline enough to be feathered. She curls herself around her broom and, later, into a nest of a magpie’s making: cigarette butts and newspapers and the occasional nibble of food.

Pale as she may look, the first man who tries to take Anya from her nest stumbles away with a black eye and curses on his tongue.

“Cyka!” A glob of ice smacks her across the cheek. Anya doesn’t flinch; she lunges for her adversary and watches as he scuttles into the night. She settles back into the shadows of her nest under Pochtamtsky Bridge. When sleep doesn’t come, held off by adrenaline, Anya counts articles in the newspaper, makes a game of spotting the lies.

When she wakes, the crick in her neck sings and the sun threatens to blind her. All the same, she’s awash in the shadow of the Bolshevik officer looming over her. His hat and gloves look mouth-wateringly warm. Anya stares for several moments too long, then scrambles to move as he shoos her away.

(Gleb Vaganov notices the bruise on her cheek later, when she’s cowering after the roar of a backfiring truck. His hand rises without a thought, as though touch alone will brush the coloring away, but the girl is half-feral, wide-eyed, and shaking; he thinks better of it, if only just.)

The general offers her tea, as though she’s a thing to be tamed. Anya makes a tactical retreat and tries not to long after the warmth of his clothes or the change in his pockets.

(She smiles as she leaves, not knowing how it guts him. The sun melts the ice from her skin, makes her dewy, almost soft to the touch. Her smile, though – that’s something else entirely.)

(The Romantics forget the many ways swans can use their teeth.)

 

II. Siegfried

He pretended to be a prince, once.

It was just after the parade, and he’d been shivering, bursting with the desire to chase, run, hunt. He’d borrowed a horse blanket from a preoccupied vendor and worn it ‘round his shoulders like a cloak. The Grand Duchess Anastasia had beamed at him when he’d approached her, and he’d kissed her hand like a gentleman. They’d danced. The earth had warmed. He’d seen the sun held captive in her eyes and been set afire by it; his skin had frozen when his cloak had turned back into a blanket and the Grand Duchess had deigned to leave him.

Dmitry knows he’s earned his reputation as a man of passion; he is always chasing, always wanting, forever hunting something more. The regime chafes him, but he does not falter. Women love him, leave him, report him to the Bolsheviks, but every time he is imprisoned, some kind Fate releases him. He’d call his life enchanted were his stomach not always rumbling, nor his body always aching, nor his heart always pounding as he walks Petersburg’s streets and trading cans of beans for favors or a night out of the cold. When Vlad comes, Dmitry welcomes him as a lover; when his advances are rejected in favor of a shared nest, he’s – confused, but not unhappy.

Dmitry sleeps soundly with Vlad at his back, but he never manages to stop moving.

Ambition, Vlad calls it. Dmitri cracks his knuckles and wonders if it isn’t something else: a jittering, a forever. A curse.

 

III. Rothbart

Gleb Vaganov is familiar with the sensation of his tongue shrinking in his mouth. It doesn’t happen frequently, but he knows the creep of dryness when it strikes him in the night, when the nightmares, shots, and dark shadows wake him with silent screaming. He lets it pass, rises from his bed and makes himself tea with lemon, often staring from his window over the skyline of Leningrad.

Were he religious, he would not call himself a good man. He’s too familiar with his gun; in his boredom, he dismantles the pistol he carries forever at his side and puts the workings of it back together. He paces, tosses it from hand to hand, and counts the bullets he’s put in the heads of other men. There’s a neutrality to it that begets the nights he spends alone, awake, staring at Yusupov Palace like it’s a silenced titan.

Sleepless or not, he makes his morning rounds. He gathers slinking gossip. He watches the street sweeper out of the corner of his eye, until one day, she’s kneeling, and he’s on the ground with her and wondering if she has nightmares, too; if they are, in some ways, kin.

(And he’s not the villain yet, so he allows himself moments; when she’s in his office, after, her long neck pale and her hands curled into fists; he wonders at the texture of her strawberry blonde hair. It strikes him feathery, from a distance, and though he’s not a hunting man, he longs to stalk closer, to run it between his fingers and ever so gently _pull_ -)

He chastises himself and her, though he still presses a cup of tea into her hands. She barely drinks it, but later, he’ll trace the rim of her cup with his finger and think on his father with his mother, their early days and the way the snow caught between them, the way their love had cradled their son.

Still, he dreams of gunshots. But there’s Anya, and she’s smiling, and even as her heart is bleeding out, she’s opening her arms to him, and damn it all, he goes. Her blood smears across his chest. Her eyes are too blue. When he wakes, he surprises himself by breathing; there’s a tightness to his body and a shame, dark and welling. The hand he wants to shove into his pants grips his thigh, instead; he stays quiet. He calms. He wonders.

(When the story ends, later, Anya caresses the back of his neck, and he knows her: two feral creatures scenting at one another. He opens his mouth, ready to ask for her, ready to die for her if she commands. He hates himself. He thinks he might be in love with her.)

(Gleb Vaganov never quite tips over into villain. He clutches swan feathers to his chest, cuts an arrow off mid-air, and hopes.)

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought!


End file.
